The Game of Transportation

I ride public transportation almost every single day. I am convinced that transportation in the Philippines is a game. There are very few rules to this game, but a whole lot of surprises and challenges.

The wild cards are the pedestrians and the motorcycles. You never know when one is going to pop out at you from behind a vehicle, a pole, or just simply walk across the road for the fun of it. If you hit one, you do not pass go, you do not collect $100, but you get to have a lovely chat with the police -- not a desirable consequence at all.

The object of the game is to get to your destination by fitting your car like a puzzle piece wherever you think it might fit, or might not fit but you try anyway. The obstacles are the jeeps that stop at the whim of the passengers and if you're not one of the passengers, you get the privilege of nearly ramming into the back of one at the most unexpected moments.

Pedestrians play the game too. Not only are some of them the wild cards, but they must fight against each other, all the while maintaining the necessary cultural reserve and politeness so ingrained into Filipino culture, to get into a jeep. The last jeep in my series of rides to school fills up in a muddy parking lot. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason apparent as to how they choose the next jeep that will fill up. I have learned to approach cautiously, see how many people have already exceeded the maximum capacity requirement listed on the side of the jeep, and then try to read the mind of the guy taking the money as he heads to the next jeep that will fill up. The next jeep could be all the way across the parking lot and there is a huge, but quiet rush of people trying to get on to the next jeep and if you don't have a good idea where the next jeep is, you'll probably end up missing the next 4. It is perfectly acceptable to come from the end of the line to the very front and stick your money into the guy's outstretched arm and hop on board ahead of the other 10 people who already missed the past 4 jeeps. You just have to say, "'Scuse, po" and you get away with it. (I am one of the people who does not do this and therefore misses 4 jeeps in a row.)

Oh and my parents just got back from Kangaroo land, so bye.

Ok I'm back. Where was I... oh yes, the game. Basically the goal is to get to your destination in spite of all the obstacles and challenges. I play the game every day and almost every day something new and funny or weird happens... like the guy who was falling asleep on the jeep and his head kept bobbing. He almost hit the guy next to him because his head kept jerking down. I wanted to laugh because he always jerked awake with a surprised look on his face. Or then there was the ride where the person who packs everyone into the vehicle completely ignores the fact that people come in all shapes and sizes and even if you are the size of at least 2 people, you only count as one person and therefore you still have to squeeze the required amount of 18 passengers in an 11-passenger van which now means that you have the equivalent of 5 or 6 people in the row that is designed only for 3. I guess it's a good thing since it means there's no discrimination...... :P

And that, my friends, is the game of transportation in the Philippines. Tune in next time for the game of street food, also known as how to eat all the good street food without getting sick. Just kidding... I don't eat much street food, except for bananacue.

Looking back on the years…

Today is the birthday of a Filipino guy I met at a wedding in the middle of nowhere in Zimbabwe last July. I said Happy Birthday to him on Facebook and he reminded me of 2 videos that he had asked me to send him and I completely forgot about it since I couldn't send them from Zimbabwe since the internet was so bad. After I sent them to him, I decided to see if there were any pictures from exactly one year ago today, May 27, 2010. Sure enough. The pictures and text below were part of my PDF newsletter that I sent out on May 29th, 2010. I was watching videos and looking at pictures of Zimbabwe and there's nothing to compare it to. Africa is so different, so beautiful, and also so dark and so needy. I am so thankful I had the opportunity to be there for 3 months! 

Typhoon Day But No Typhoon!

A massive typhoon (bigger than Ondoy) was supposed to hit the nation today so school was canceled in advance. However, it veered right and didn't hit. God answered many prayers as it was supposed to be a very devastating one. http://www.tempo.com.ph/news.php?aid=55163

Zippidee-doo-da!

Come visit! We have great weather!

Establishing Routines

School hasn't officially started, but I go to school every day for classroom decorations, lesson planning, and various professional training seminars scattered around from now until school starts on June 14th. Tuesday and today were enrollment, and I had nothing really to do since I can't start planning lessons until the English teachers collaborate on Monday and decide how we'll mix two different textbooks together and divide up the class periods. I'm not a homeroom teacher, so I helped one of the new homeroom teachers decorate her bulletin boards. (There are 6 in her room.) It's coming along nicely, though. I'm just glad I'm not a homeroom teacher because I do not enjoy arts and crafts, especially big arts like bulletin board decorating.

Bagels with onion and sesame seeds

I leave for school at 6:15 if I have to be at school at 7:30 and 6:30 if I have to be there at 8. In June, official school year time will begin (7:30-4) but the usual summer hours are 8-3. These past 2 days of enrollment we did 7:30-4 to be fair to the teachers involved in the enrollment. I get home around 5 at the earliest, 5:15 usually, and closer to 6 if I have to stop somewhere (like Booksale.. haha). I eat breakfast at 5:30 and by 9:30 I'm ready for lunch. Rather than buy fattening stuff at the bakery and spend extra money, I decided to make bagels when I got home from school today so I could take it to school and eat breakfast there. (Cheaper, but also fattening... except I did use half whole wheat flour... :P I think I defeated the purpose of healthiness because I'm going to fill it with tosino...)

I have gotten into several routines that allow me to get out of the house on time in the morning.

Routine 1: Pack lunch (usually dinner left-overs) -- this was my attempt at General Tso's chicken and it was good!

Pack it in lovely purple lunch bag, complete with silverware and put in refrigerator, all ready to go!

Prepare Milo/Coffee mix in travel mug (that I snitched from my dad) so I can just add water at school.  

Clean up messy kitchen after cooking (this is an improvement over yesterday when I made General Tso's)

Looks a lot better. By the way, there's a big lizard that hangs out on the back counter and leaves presents every morning.

And of course clean up after my messy guinea pigs' fun run...

Check that I have fare money ready and pack my bags for the day

And then go to bed around 9pm and wake up again at 5!

Cheerio, mate!

PS -- Random weird dog story. I gave Ben half of a barquillo this evening. It had been thundering outside and he's deathly afraid of thunder. I went out about a half hour later and he came running up to me with the barquillo stuck out of his mouth like a cigar. Apparently he was sucking it like a pacifier. I don't know he managed to not break it, since they're very fragile things. I tried to distract him with a toy, but he closed his mouth over the barquillo to protect it and wouldn't open his mouth for his toy. Weird dog.

Quote of the Day

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."- Oscar Wilde

Pursue Excellence

As you may or may not have noticed, I have not updated my blog in a week! This is due to the fact that I started work this week! In some ways it went by quickly (in retrospect, now that it’s over) but sometimes it dragged. There are 18 new teachers this year, including a nurse and a librarian. We have a pretty good group and we definitely fit in with our united love for food (evidenced by snacking all day today…)

God has been very good in providing this school. Already I see His wisdom in placing me here, even though it was definitely not my first choice. Although I have not seen the school in action, the foundational philosophy of education at this school very closely matches my heart’s desires and passions in relation to Christian education. Their foundation is very good and in coming days I will see how this plays out in their teachers.

The school has a core of 4 values and they’re working on adding a fifth. Three of them are faith, character, and excellence. I forget the fourth, but the upcoming fifth is service. Excellence in teaching and personal Christian life was emphasized all week. We were reminded that we are Christians who also happen to be teachers, but our first and foremost responsibility is to glorify God and love the Lord as Christians. (There was a good deal of emphasis on loving the Lord but they never did specifically mention obeying the Lord… hopefully it was just because it was understood that loving God is obeying God. J ) Their pursuit of excellence and testimony before children was to the extent that one teacher said she doesn’t cross the street if there happens to be a pedestrian light and the light happens to be red, regardless if cars are coming or not. She does it just in case one of her students sees her and thinks that it’s ok to pick and choose what rules to obey depending on the situation. If you know anything about the Philippines, people cross the street whenever they feel like crossing, red light or not, and if you stand there and actually wait for the light to turn green like you’re supposed to, you look pretty lonely (and silly) standing there all alone. Today we had an extensive lecture on piracy and what pirating really means and how much it extends into our lives, more than we may realize. Again, if you know anything about the Philippines, the black market is out the roof. It is so bad that some companies will not sell to the Philippines because they know how quickly things are pirated. The teacher giving the lecture said he couldn’t download a legal copy of the national anthem online because it was for USA download only. The school promotes legal and less expensive alternatives, but condones any pirated material at school (and hopefully in the personal lives of both faculty and students). The teacher said to think of this as an opportunity to teach the kids to take a stand for what is right in a culture where pirating is so common that few even think twice about doing it or buying pirated material. He quoted a lot of verses including the one on being faithful in the least.  Back when for some reason I thought Limewire was legal, I had music I had downloaded. I just deleted it all and hey, I got 1gb back of space on my computer! J Pursue excellence in profession and character and Christian walk.

All week we watched lectures called “The Laws of the Learner” by Dr. Bruce Wilkinson. There were 7 laws and each tape was about 71-81 minutes long. It was a bit of an overload, but the material itself was good. The teachers used to watch it every year. The focus is on teaching not just for the sake of dumping material on students and getting good tests but teaching for learning and for change for the better. When we read the philosophy of education together, it might as well have been my paper that I wrote in Philosophy of Education several years ago. I am blessed to be at a school where their goals so closely match mine and where they help to train the teachers because they know that one never stops learning. Wherever God takes me after this, I am thankful that I have this opportunity to grow professionally in an environment where they take their profession seriously. Who knows where I’ll be in a few years, but I only pray that the training received here will help me be better prepared for the next mission field God has for me. And of course, I pray that I will be able to touch the lives of the students and lead them to think Biblically and act Biblically in every area of their life. Faith, excellence, character, service, and whatever the other one is. J

In other news, my timecard ins keep getting earlier and earlier. I discovered that if I leave later than 6:30, I get into a long line for the jeep. If I leave right at 6:30, I can easily get on a jeep, but then I get to work at 7:10 or so. For now the summer hours are 8-3 (but we had to stay until 4 this week). School time is 10 minutes ahead of my watch. When school starts, I’ll have to leave really early for the first week to gage how the student volume contributes to traffic. Plus, our hours are 7:30-4 during the school year.

Cheerio, mate! J

PS -- the picture is from when Kim was in Manila. We met for dinner on Wednesday. :)

Here comes the rain...

Randomness is the spice of life

Wednesday: Go to PRC
Thursday: Go to Manila Zoo
Friday: Go to CHED

Inasal ni Joe is not nearly good as Mang Inasal

So where did I go today? The mall. How exciting! I didn't plan on going anywhere today and I took my time getting up this morning... making breakfast... doing laundry... finishing part of my dad's slideshow for his international church visits... Then a girl from CRBC needed to borrow my flute so I decided to meet her part-way. It also happened that Joash was meeting Kemi and Gian to discuss their pre-nuptial photoshoot and so I tagged along. Grace tagged along with Joash so while they met, we explored National Bookstore. Haha! It was so random but it was fun. This makes the 4th time I've seen Grace in one week. If I don't see her by next Tuesday I'll be in withdrawal. :)

Joash met his buddy Darth Vader

A little puny compared to The Hulk, eh?

No idea...

Manila Zoo, part 2 and other ramblings

Maramara Family

I am convinced that this country has entirely too much good food. I noticed someone's status on Facebook about all the food stops she made in one day. Not only is it good, it's also very accessible and can be very affordable (if you're not gourmet). This morning I went to the Commission on Higher Education Department (or something like that... CHED for short) and I left later than usual, so I stopped by the corner bakeshop on the way out and bought a 3 peso "cheese bread" which is a whole lot of air and sugar and calories. It was still good! I made it to CHED in two and a half hours. There wasn't any traffic... it was just far away and a lot of transfers to get there. I didn't actually know how to get to CHED, but I knew it was located in the Univresity of the Philippines campus. Oh, www.ph-commute.com is my new best friend. It told me how to get to UP and then I wandered around and asked people what jeeps to take and asked the drivers to tell me when to get off. They're very obliging and helpful, so it wasn't a problem. I got to CHED, dropped off all my papers for evaluation and left. It was ten minutes max. All that for 10 minutes! Oh well -- it was necessary. (I even dressed like a professional teacher just in case I met the evaluator!) I took a different route home and made a pitstop at Mang Inasal. Mang Inasal has really good food and unlimited rice. I just had halo-halo because I was hot and hungry but not hungry enough to eat a real meal. I eventually did make it home in spite of wandering around trying to find where to cross the street. :P This afternoon I had to go pick up a skirt at the tailor's and because I'm so terribly lazy when it comes to feeding myself, I walked to a corner store where they have sold ihaw (pork barbecue) for as long as I can remember and got some for dinner. Good news... the only thing that has changed is the price. It's still delicious! It was too early to eat dinner, so I washed the dog and cleaned the guinea pig cage and now I'm doing this to get my mind off eating. :P Seriously... there is too much good food here than what's good for me. People wonder why I eat so little in the States... come here and you'll learn what real eating is! :)

Manila Zoo, part 1

A sense of humor runs in the family...

Joash meets his long-lost twin

I promised you riveting pictures, so here are two and more will be coming later.

May the 4th be with you!

** By the way, I have recently discovered other features to Blogger and finally installed the new editor which allows me to select multiple pictures at once (HOORAY!!!) and to insert a jump break into posts with a link to read the full post. This way the posts don't clutter up the entire page so much. Mostly this satisfies my nerdy tendency. :) **

Happy Star Wars Day! Today was an incredibly random day. If I looked hard enough, I could download a map of Manila and draw a line showing all the places I went today. The vastness of public transportation never ceases to amaze me. I was supposed to go to Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) to get my transcript evaluated so they could tell me what parts of the Licensure Exam for Teachers (LET) I need to take. Hapi went with me because she had been there before. We spent about 5 minutes in PRC and the only thing we found out was that I was in the wrong place. They don't take international transcripts. Hapi didn't have to be at work until 2, so we decided to wander around Manila. We checked out a few bookstores and I finally got a planner! I've been looking for one for a while and couldn't find one to my liking. This one was filthy, but it cleaned up nicely and was more than 50% off. Woot! Then we went to Mega Mall and ate lunch and loitered. :P Totally random day, didn't go according to plan, but it was fun and I got to hang out with Hapi.

Plan for tomorrow: Go to Manila Zoo. Tune in next time for riveting animal pictures (or crazy pictures of us... which is just as good if not more riveting).

Ok, seriously? This was in a "Christian" bookstore! Suplado means snobbish. Why would you write a book on how to be more snobbish? It was wrapped up so I couldn't benefit from any of the tips. :P

Friends, Mud, and Lessons Learned

I went hiking this past weekend. The hike was the muddiest, hardest, and most fun hike I've been on. It rained on and off all day so the trail was extremely muddy. The hike was supposed to take about 2 hours but it took us 4 and a half hours to go up and 2 and a half to come down. The goal was to start hiking at 3am and catch the sunrise, but due to waiting around for jeeps to get to the mountain, we didn't start hiking until 4:40am. It was just as well because it was so slippery and hiking that in the dark would have been so much worse than it already was.

Joash tried to make rice but it ended up looking like puto because he didn't put enough water in! When you go on a day hike in the Philippines, you have to bring a pot and a little stove so you can have rice!

Food Quotes

Bling my ride??? Hahaha

Welcome to the Big City!

I went to Market!Market! supermarket today and the pillars in the store had hilarious food quotes... People were staring at me as I was walking around laughing and taking pictures. I don't think anyone else really bothered to read all the posts.